Archive for Meta Analysis

Yesterday, I discussed eight hitters whose batted ball distances suggested an imminent power surge. Today I’ll take a look at the opposite side of the coin — those whose distances suggest their current HR/FB rates are unsustainable. As a reminder, this analysis assumes the distances are maintained. Obviously we’re still dealing with a relatively small sample size and these hitters are capable of boosting their batted ball distances to match their HR/FB rates.

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The first pitch is a complicated moment in any at-bat. The strike rate on the pitch is rising as pitchers pump it in the zone to get their advantage. And yet the swing rate on the pitch is diving as hitters try to be more patient in an era in which on-base percentage is praised. There’s evidence that this new approach isn’t any worse than the old-school approach — but that’s for baseball as a whole.

There have to be batters that are taking or swinging too much on the first pitch of an at-bat. If you’re a selective hitter, it makes sense to take. You’ll get a lot of 1-0 counts, and you’ll have a great sense of what’s a hittable pitch. If you’re more of an aggressive hitter that reaches often, maybe it makes sense to swing more often at strike one. You’ll avoid more 0-1 counts, and you’ll put some nice pitches into play.

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There is just so much fun you can have analyzing the batted ball distance leaderboard. The possibilities are seemingly endless and we haven’t even scratched the surface of exactly how we could use this data. But since we know distance is highly correlated with HR/FB rate, we could look at the leaders and laggards to predict who might be in for a surge or decline in their respective HR/FB rates. The key, of course, is that the player maintains a similar batted ball distance. We’re still dealing with a relatively small sample size here, so these potential surgers will only surge if they keep hitting balls as far as they have on average.

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If fans thought they saw a bunch of shifts in last season, the numbers are really up even higher this year. Some players’ productions are really suffering because of the ideal defensive alignment. Today I am going to give a quick look at how often a batter hit into a shift compared to the same time frame in 2013.

Just a couple of reminders on the data. The data is for major infield shifts (3 or more players on one side of the infield). The data is only available on batted balls, so if a player was shifted and struck out, the data wasn’t available. Also, I did not include home runs. Finally, the data is a few days behind, so all data was taken from May 4th and earlier for both 2013 and 2014.

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Yesterday, I discussed the April batted ball distance surgers. So naturally, today I’ll check in on the decliners. Because regression to the mean is such a powerful force, a distance decline sticks more often than a surge does. In other words, I would be more concerned about a decliner than excited about a surger.

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Now that we’re more than a month into the season, we finally have enough data to start taking batted ball distance numbers seriously. When developing my latest xHR/FB rate equation, I limited the player population to include only those who recorded at least 20 home runs and fly balls. At this point, the majority of the leaderboard sits between 20 and 25, so let’s dig in and start by looking at which hitters have experienced the largest increase since last season.

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Yesterday, I ran out of time while writing my MASH Report to look at how the possible effects of diminished velocity could have on Clayton Kershaw. Well, using a couple of untested, but promising ideas, it seems he will be may not struggle with less fastball speed.

The worries with Kershaw stem from this tweet.

89-91, touched 92 a few times. RT @gq2scoops: Anybody know how Kershaw’s velocity was tonight?

— Dustin Nosler (@DustinNosler) May 1, 2014

He could be getting some of his strength back, but a possible 2+ mph drop could mean trouble for him. Kershaw’s fastball has at least averaged 92.5 mph in each of his six previous season. By looking at how he has produced previously at times with a lower velocities my indicate how he will do in the future.

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With about a month of baseball played so far, let’s take a look today at some of the players hitting into an infield shift. Some players have always been shifted like David Ortiz and Ryan Howard, but other hitters are seen the shift deployed against them for the first time. Today, I will look at some early season trends on some players and the effects they may be seeing.

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We always hear our not-so-favorite broadcasters mentioning a player’s stats against a certain pitcher. Well, I think we are all hopefully smart enough to not take the results of 15 meetings between a pitcher and hitter seriously. Instead, we split samples into larger groups like right-handed hitter vs. left-handed pitcher. I have decided to cut the difference and create a spreadsheet which takes a middle ground. I grouped pitchers by handedness, velocity and groundball tendencies and found how hitters performed against the different pitcher groups.

First off, I wanted to have this Excel-only spreadsheet available online before the season started. Well, I got it done and working in time. Since Visual Basic macros were used in the final view, it doesn’t have a online option which I wanted. So today, I am going to make it publicly available, but at some point I hope to have it working in all spreadsheet formats and/or online at a place like Google.docs.

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I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions that Mike Podhorzer came to about the closers in Milwaukee and Chicago earlier today, but his writeup makes sense, and it is still notable what’s happening in those cities. The fireballing favorite was passed over for a couple of veterans. That’s too bad because the only thing I’ve seen that says much about closer change is fastball velocity and strikeout rate. Neither Matt Lindstrom nor Francisco Rodriguez own real leads over Nate Jones and Jim Henderson in those categories. And yet, it’s the veterans with more service time that are closing right now.

Maybe that’s not by accident. Matt Murphy wrote a great piece about how it’s possible that teams are using veteran closers on short term contracts in order to keep their arbitration-eligible young relievers cheap. No saves means no bucks in arbitration. Whether or not teams are actually doing so on purpose, there are ready examples in Oakland, Cleveland, and Tampa Bay (and now Chicago and Milwaukee) where the arbitration kid lost out to the free agent contract vet. Should we add age to the equation when we are thinking about closer changes?

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